Another first for Vermont as the state breaks ground on a project that combines solar and energy storage in a microgrid funded through a unique federal-state-utility-NGO partnership.

Nashua, NH --
Today Green Mountain Power (GMP) broke ground on a solar plus energy storage microgrid in Rutland, Vermont with one expert calling it a "perfect" project. The 2.5-MW Stafford Hill solar project is being developed in conjunction with Dynapower and GroSolar and includes 4 MW of battery storage, both lithium ion and lead acid, to integrate the solar generation into the local grid, and to provide resilient power in case of a grid outage.

Interested in microgrids? Sign up for our Microgrid Executive MBA Training Course with author and professor Mahesh Bhave. In this course, you will learn to evaluate project economics of microgrid projects in a variety of markets using case studies, financial models, and templates. Find more information here.

The companies said that this project is one of the first solar-only microgrids in the nation, and the first to provide full back-up to an emergency shelter on the distribution network. “Solar power and battery storage will provide clean reliable power to a school that serves as an emergency shelter, helping a community cope with loss of power in a future disaster,” said Lewis Milford, president of Clean Energy Group, which manages the Clean Energy States Alliance.

Green Mountain Power has set a goal of making Rutland, VT the solar capital of New England and this project, which is also being developed on a brownfield site thereby revitalizing a depressed area, will help it meet that goal.

“This project is a national model for the future of clean energy – combining solar with energy storage,” said Dr. Imre Gyuk (pictured in hat at podium), Energy Storage Program Manager in the DOE's Office of Electricity Delivery. “This project provides resilient power during emergencies while benefitting the grid at other times. The technical innovations will reduce cost and make the project commercially viable…. This is the perfect project! It has social value, technical innovation, and furthers renewable integration for the grid.”

Gyuk, who said he was in "an excellent mood" after the groundbreaking event on Tuesday, continued: "This project has everything and in particular, it has total buy-in [from federal, state, and local government agencies as well as industry and the utility]."

Gyuk said the the cost recovery for this project will come largely through services to the grid. "During non-emergency periods, [the energy storage] is simply there to make the grid smoother," he said. Gyuk is particularly interested in how utilities will value grid resiliency and said that this project will help further that discussion. "Emergency services are more difficult to monitize," he explained.

In terms of the value of energy storage, "frequency regulation has now become a commerially viable business," said Gyuk. This isn't only because it has been demonstrated to work technically but also because FERC realized the value of doing it fast and with clean energy, he said. Gyuk estimates that frequency regulation with energy storage is valued a roughly twice what frequency regulation is when it's done with fossil fuels.

The energy storage component of this project is co-funded by a federal-state-NGO partnership involving the State of Vermont; the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Electricity; and the Energy Storage Technology Advancement Partnership (ESTAP), a project managed by Clean Energy States Alliance and Sandia National Laboratories.

GMP said that the project puts Vermont in the forefront of the new movement toward microgrids, energy storage, and grid modernization. Solar + storage and microgrid technologies are poised to revolutionize resilient power, bringing clean, locally-generated power to communities all over the world. These systems can keep critical facilities, such as emergency shelters, firehouses and fueling stations, operating when the grid goes down.

There is a great need for such resilient power solutions, as shown by recent disasters like Hurricane Sandy, which affected the entire eastern seaboard and left millions without electrical service. With this project, Vermont takes a giant step toward addressing this need, as well as meeting Vermont’s clean energy and emissions reduction goals.

The $10 million project is expected to be up and running by December 2014.

Editor's note: Want to learn how to design a microgrid? Sign up for RenewableEnergyWorld.com's Microgrid Executive MBA Training Course with author and professor Mahesh Bhave. In this course, you will learn to evaluate project economics of microgrid projects in a variety of markets using case studies, financial models, and templates. Find more information here.

24 Comments

Vehicle to grid is based on a contract to allow a certain part of your battery charger to be used for the very profitable job of frequency stabilizing and spinning reserve. 5% of battery capacity is very reasonable, and will pay for their ecar. 5% won't impact tier battery lifetime in any significant way.

Jay, all energy in the USA is propped up by the gov. Nuclear and fossils still get 50 times solar and wind. Looks like they pay 17 cents, but it's not clear. http://www.vermontelectric.coop/residential-service/residential-service-rates
They also get most of the electricity from nuclear and hydro. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Vermont
They are using the gov breaks for renewable to try and break free of nuclear and Canadian hydro.
Do you insist fossils and nuclear industry stop getting all their breaks and pay for all the breaks they have gotten for 50 and 100 years?

I am trying to understand the economics of this deal and what makes it perfect. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and we have wholesale 3.2¢ per kWh low carbon hydro. Retail, is about 8.6¢ per kWh. In our area, we generate about 1,100 kWh per kW per year with solar. It typically costs about $3.5 per watt to install solar here.

What is the situation in Vermont - what are the legacy sources and what wholesale cost? How does that compare with the solar that is being built? How many kWh per kW of solar is typical for solar generation in VT? If I add up what they are getting for $10 million, it seems expensive.

As I was reminded at a recent APS meeting in Phoenix, current talk of using electric vehicle batteries for storage entails controlling charge rates to manage grid fluctuations. It does not entail pulling energy from the battery to meet demand. No knowledgeable electric vehicle owner would allow the grid operator/ISO to cycle their expensive battery pack and shorten its life unless they were compensated.

The more I think about it the more I realise electric cars would be the most suitable source of storage. A rolling storage system would not consume any more land with the amount of roads and parking in North America. Always available idle cars plugged into the grid for times of need and storing surplus when it is available. If it sounds like a fantasy just look at all the cars around.
Good reason for serious research in R&D for battery storage.
And with nice light weight hemp fiber bodies so the farmers can have another viable crop

So lets do the Math ummmmm...2.5MW solar farm @ $1.3MUSD per MW comes to $3.25MUSD (Worldwide Standard)
so they spent.... lets say... to get to 4MW batt power another $1MUSD per MW comes to $4MUSD (and WOW is that way to much money for them batteries....)

Gilbert, good comment. I have visited Vermont, and most of the time folks are inside anyway. I have skied their mountains and you are so right, the wind never stops! Vermont has very good waste bio mass.

Staden, storage is about the same for old school baseload coal and nuclear as modern solar and wind.
Baseload needs peaking and reserve fossils plants for load following.

Renewables need peaking and reserve for gap filling.

The only additional storage that would vastly improve the grid, renewable or not, would be distributed battery storage to eliminate physical spinning reserve, frequency and voltage regulations and the 15 minute storage needed till the cold start hydrocarbon reserve gen are running. That would save the energy wasted idling generators that both baseload and renewable need, and respond much faster.

Yes, we have wind power (mostly UNUSED resources unfortunately). There have been a few problems with some recalcitrant folks that think Vermont should be limited to covered bridges here and there for the "traditional" scenery and none of that new fangled wind turbine stuff to "ruin the view" . I say phooey on them! The wind turbines that have gone up and continue to be increased in number are sited in VERY reliable wind locations tantamount to base load type power. There's a LOT of steady wind up there that is never going to go away.

The wind turbines up on mountain ridges aren't even visible a lot of the time. This is just plain stubbornness. Governor Shumlin and our state reps are as forward thinking and pro Renewable Energy as they come so I expect we will be the first state of the union to be fossil free.

Vermont is hilly so many people think EVs won't work here because of the quick battery drain from climbing hills but with regenerative braking technology the range of EVs will NOT be that reduced here and the stubborn foot draggers will get with the program.

We got rid of the Vermont Yankee Radioactive White Elephant despite the courts siding with Entergy! We'll get rid of fossil fuels too!

Wow, got to love Vermont ambition. I hope it works. Vermont has ample wastes for waste to fuels to backup solar and the local microgrid, distribution substation level. They also have wind, right?

Let's all remember ONE THING: demand is the more variable and completely unpredictable compared to solar and wind. Storage helps fossils and nuclear baseload inflexible plants just as much as it does intermittent but predictable solar and wind.

A G Gelbert Hello again. USA problem with energy industry is almost entirely political--huge political power of too big to fail fossil fuel firms--huge capitalists determined to maximize shareholder profit. The capitalists in the electric utility part of the energy industry are a much smaller part of the problem. They already accepted a long time ago that they would get a pretty near fixed return on their investment in exchange for having to accept direction from state level government. Turning the electric grid off for 75% of the day everyday would NOT help. What would help is a smart electric grid and dynamic pricing of electric, such that customers pay the generating charge the utility pays plus one or two cents brokerage fee. The part about not slowing down the economy is about business customers (factories if any, offices, retail stores, warehouses) NOT residential customers who merely consumers. The rationing of fuels such as consumers buy (natural gas, gasoline, and oil) makes sense but can't be imposed on business. In WWII trucks and buses still ran--bus riders probably had to use part of their fuel ration towards bus far--trucks probably had a separate, more generous ration system.

@Terry Hallinan : we shouldn't always reply to everything that might help perpetuate mis-information, but it would help if sites like this one could, now and again, slip into their news articles accurate reminders of answers to questions like your tongue-in-cheek one 'Where will the lithium come from? :-)' .

As I understand it, there is plenty of lithium available (it isn't a rare earth metal) in some salt lakes, salty groundwaters and the ocean. Unfortunately, it's currently several times less expensive to vandalise unique salt lakes than to extract lithium from sea-water. There is more to the environment than living organisms.

Concerning the article, I agree with other commentators that it seems over-hyped. Berlin had a huge lead-acid battery during the blockade. I'd like to know how batteries compare with some of the newer storage methods we read about, including cases like this one where they might want to include fail-safe low-tech emergency lighting that doesn't depend on a grid. Also, since storage is expensive, an interested spectator could ask whether a better financial balance could not have been achieved by including wind power in the project.

I asked the question to point out the absurdity of this "perfect" solution to problems with intermittent sources of energy. One new source of a rare earth is geothermal brines. Geothermal is the ultimate baseload power source.

Another great baseload renewable power source is waste as mentioned already. Vermont is the green, green state that converted a natural gas plant to burn wood waste but also one that refused to utilize a "magic pond" that didn't freeze in winter for its geothermal power potential.

Hi Grace. Thank you and than you Michael Kaelin, Bill Fitch III and Ed Hutchinson too!

Ed, I hear ya but really, Vermonters will NEVER discard wood chip pellet heat as a resource. It's a no brainer because it is renewable AS LONG AS WE AREN'T CUTTING DOWN OLD FOREST to get the wood. But that doesn't mean we should look there FIRST. As to pellet stoves, I say we should mandate them and make heating oil and kerosene furnaces ILLEGAL! And natural gas too UNLESS it is cow power or some other renewable natural gas source (NOT FRACKING!).

We will always need a multiple renewable energy approach to put all crazy fossil fuel and nuclear power destructive technologies in the circular file FOREVER!

I get very energized when editors don't make distinctions between energy and power. I assume the energy storage is 4MWh, why not say that. 4MW of storage is meaningless. A school resource with a micro-grid is useful when the outer grid is down. An emergency center with a backed up micro-grid is a great idea. In VT I hope we would never consider trying to generate the thermal needs of a school with PV. Wood chip and pellet boilers will do very nicely but they need electric power to operate. I think this is a great project. I'm not a GMP customer, we are on a small coop, but for the most part I like most of what GMP is doing.

It is too bad that the utilities and their partners have coopted the term "microgrid." It was meant to describe a group of electricity users, such as a neighborhood, that have gotten together their own energy production and storage system. That system might or might not be connected to a utility grid.

Really, what this HUGE system should be called is a commercial grid-tied with battery backup system.

What did they prove? All of this is existing technology. Nothing new. I have seen similar Micro-grids that are over 50 years old with battery backup. They ran old IBM mainframes with UPS systems. Lead-acid batteries. Emergency generators running in parrell or island mode with the grid. Had knife switches. Research money should be used for something new. I have seen other systems that are newer within the last ten years that also do the same thing. Micro-grids go back to Thomas Edison. Have been working on a building 1909 that was a micro-grid with internal electric generation. So lets invest in new technology. Everything done here is old hat for the industry.

Hi: This is a good project. Lets not forget for those responders that reply on cost alone, that first time projects are not FIRST about cost. It is about getting the engineering together in the real world to see how it all works in the real world.
A good first step in the right direction, not based of nuke or FF energy....

This is one of the most wasteful applications of a Microgrid I have seen in my life. In 35 years of performing co-generation studies I have never heard of proposing one for a Public School. The thermal loads on average to small and only significant for a limited number of hours per year during the winter. Schools are in session for approximately 1/8 of the hours of a year. The DHW and cooking loads in the non-heating season maybe support 10-25kW co-generation plant. Not worth installing if you want emergency capacity for heating, lighting, and running an emergency shelter. Spending $10,000,000 for battery back-up of a 250 to 500 kW load is rediculess. A good emergency generator would cost under $250,000 with a big storage tank assuming Rutland does not have natural gas the project cost bolloons to $500,000. For a need that is an average of 24hrs per year that is a lot of money. The solar system can stand on its own. Lets spend the $9.5 million on resiliency such as better roads, more efficient buildings that do not require that much heat, better bridges so they do not wash out. I just think the priorities are all mixed up.

Depending on batteries to backup our electric grid is short sited. Is the United States going to spend trillions of dollars on batteries to back-up the grid. I do not think so!!!!. I also do not think the quantities of raw materials (rare earth minerals) exist.

Willimantic CT is getting a micro-grid too on two schools that happen to be back fence neighbors. It is cool that Green Mountain Power's micro-grid is all solar and storage. Willimantic has quite a bit of solar, but also has a combined heat and power natural gas system because the school needs heat in the winter and Connecticut Light & Power was somehow able to veto batteries for backup power. Hello A G Gelbert. Grace Adams

As a resident of Vermont and GMP customer, I celebrate this prudent, wise, profitable and sustainable course of action. Thank you, GMP, for acting sanely while surrounded by an insane U.S. energy industry.

Perhaps logical thinking will catch on in the rest of the country in general and the utilities in particular. But I'm not holding my breath.

Not discussed in most energy web sites and threads is the FACT that many, many people like myself are QUITE WILLING to accept all kinds of WWII type restrictions on energy use in order to go 100% renewable energy. That is, I am willing to ACCEPT an INSTANT and PERMANENT elimination of grid power for 75% of the day, every day. Also a 2 gallon per day LIMIT on TOTAL gasoline/heating oil/ equivalent cubic feet of natural gas consumption. WE ARE READY TO DO IT NOW!

Just IMAGINE the HUGE drop in national energy use if we ALL did that and anybody who wanted more HAD to get it from renewable energy, not fossil fuels or nuclear power. And NO MORE DIRTY ENERGY SUBSIDIES OF ANY KIND!

But in our idiotic "we cannot slow down the economy for a silly thing like having a viable biosphere" world, these OBVIOUS rapid fixes to get off dirty energy in less than a decade just never get traction.

Obvious and sane behavior needs to become part of the USA again. I hope GMP is showing the way.